Telephone bill summary information is useful for a variety of purposes. For example, bill summary information may be used to automatically debit accounts for payment, to distribute charges to those who incurred them, and for cost tracking and reduction. Conventional telephone bills provide standard summary information, such as the location of a placed call and the total charges due over a predetermined period of time. The customer who receives the bill has no control over the summary information presented on the bill and cannot define or request custom summary information to appear on the bill. Recipients of such bills must themselves generate the summary information they need. It would be useful if bills including the desired customer defined or requested summary information were automatically generated by the telephone billing process.
More specifically, U.S. Pat. No. 5,982,864 entitled “Telephone Billing with Customized Billing Information,” and U.S. Pat. No. 6,058,170 entitled “Telephone Billing with Summary Information,” to Jagadish et al. disclose the capability to present billing information to a user in a user-specified form, subject to specific limitations. Patents describe the nature of the accumulated summary information for a particular customer as depending on the services subscribed to by that customer. For example, the patents provide that it may be useful to maintain a summary field containing the number of minutes of calls that the customer has made during a particular discount period.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method that enables a telecommunications consumer to dynamically arrange incoming and outgoing calls prior to the completion of the call into user-specified groups. There is also a need for a system and method that allows a telecommunications user to interactively create and organize groups in a master account by project, person, organization, purpose, etc.